Tradition, Discipline, and Creativity: Developing Strong Poets in Legal Writing
![handle is hein.journals/lstf20 and id is 109 raw text is: TRADITION, DISCIPLINE, AND CREATIVITY:
DEVELOPING STRONG POETS IN
LEGAL WRITING
TERESA GODWIN PHELPS
Consider the poor legal writing teacher: caught between a Scylla
composed of the American Bar Association, law school deans, and law
firms, all demanding disciplined writing from law school graduates and
the Charybdis of having to require soulless, repetitive, formulaic
writing from students. Can legal writing teachers do their jobs - i.e.
turn out competent legal writers - without becoming the vampires of
the first year, draining their students of the lifeblood of creativity and
storytelling?
I find myself caught in a such a paradox. For years I have
devoted much of my scholarly output to arguing the importance of
narrative. A look at my own writing reveals a near addiction to the
notion that narrative is requisite to the law, that narrative will
increase our students' engagement with the human and ethical side
of the law;1 that [1]aw divorced from narrative impoverishes us and
our students; rules without stories result in bad law and bad
lawyers.2
Yet late each August I meet with my Teaching Assistants and
then with my 180 first year legal writing students and argue the
importance of discipline, of forms, of uniformity. I ask the students to
be, in Jim Elkins' words, formulaic, dispassionate, objective. Am I a
hopeless hypocrite, speaking one thing to my students and another to
my peers and colleagues, privately embracing narrative, yet publicly
advocating formulas? Is disciplined writing opposite to narrative
writing?
At many turning points in my life, I have accepted such false
dualisms. In doing so, I created for myself a rigid either/or structure
and assumed I was forced to choose one or the other. I embraced the
theme of Robert Frost's poem, The Road Not Taken:
And both that morning equally lay/In leaves no step had trodden
blackJOh, I kept the first for another day!/ Yet knowing how way
leads on to way/I doubted if I should ever come back.
Frost suggests that our lives are comprised of forks in the road, and
that choosing one thing means not choosing the other: a rigid dualistic
structure, A or not/A. So, do I, as a law teacher, scholar, writer
1 Teresa Godwin Phelps, Review of Wayne Booth's THE COMPANY WE KEEP, 39 J.
Legal Educ. 463, 463 (1989).
2 Id. at 467.](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/lstf20&div=12&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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Tradition, Discipline, and Creativity: Developing Strong Poets in Legal Writing
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